Talking Translation: Translators Talk Poetry

Riccardo Duranti is a translator, poet and narrator. He taught English Literature and Literary Translation at the University La Sapienza of Rome for a long time. He translated the collected works of Raymond Carver and many other authors including Roald Dahl, Ted Hughes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tibor Fischer, Philip K. Dick, Michael Ondaatje, John Berger, Olive Schreiner, Isaac B.Singer, Elizabeth Bishop, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry David Thoreau and Peter Orner. In 1996 he received the national prize for translation from the Ministry for Cultural Heritage.  

Erica Hesketh joined the Poetry Translation Centre from English PEN, where she managed the Writers in Translation programme. She previously worked as an editor at Bloomsbury Publishing, a literary events programmer at Southbank Centre, and the book campaigns director at The Pigeonhole. She is also a musician and composer, working frequently with poems and poets in translation. She curates occasional Shared Readings at the Poetry Library, and serves on the editorial board of the translation journal In Other Words. She has a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Oxford 

Francesca Spinelli is an Italian translator and journalist based in Brussels. Her translations include works by Honoré de Balzac, Ismail Kadare, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Amanda Gorman. She is the poetry editor at Internazionale, an Italian weekly magazine, working with a team of translators to promote foreign poetry among Italian readers, and translating herself authors such as Brendan Kennelly, Mary Ruefle, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, François Cheng and Carl Norac.